7 Components of a Successful Testimonial Collection Campaign

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Collecting testimonials from your customers takes some time and effort. Typically, a customer won’t leave a testimonial unless they have had an outstanding experience with your company, are incentivized to do so, or feel completely comfortable with your testimonial collection process. This especially rings true when collecting video testimonials. Wondering how to encourage more customers to submit testimonials? These are 7 components you’ll need to make your testimonial collection campaign successful.

7 Components of a Successful Testimonial Collection Campaign

1. Create a Strategy

The first component of a successful testimonial collection campaign is a strategy. This strategy should include goals that you’re aiming to achieve. For example, how many monthly testimonials are you hoping to add to your testimonial collection? You should also consider what type of content you’re hoping to collect when running your testimonial campaign. Are you looking for longer, more detailed testimonials, or shorter, faster testimonials? Video, written, or both? Once you’ve considered the type of content you’d like to collect, do the initial leg work to identify key data that your client could touch on in their testimonial to make the content more specific.

2. Build Your List of Clients

The next component of a successful testimonial collection campaign is a list of clients. You’ll need to make sure that you identify a list of clients that are highly likely to leave you testimonials to start. Then you’ll need to find a way to continuously grow this list. One way to do that is to incorporate a testimonial strategy into your sales pipeline. Find an ideal point in the sales pipeline to reach out to your customers and automate this process.

3. Create a Collection Form

The next crucial component of a successful testimonial collection campaign is a testimonial collection form. Keep your form a manageable length and make sure to focus on the most important form fields, like the written testimonial field, the video recording field and the client’s name. The point of this form is to collect a compelling testimonial from your customer, so you don’t want them to be bogged down by too many form fields.

4. Use Compelling Copy

Another component of a successful testimonial collection campaign is compelling copy to persuade your customers. You need to make sure that you’re using language, examples and form fields that are easy to comprehend and will inspire your customers to submit their own testimonials.
It’s helpful here to not only explain how to submit a testimonial, but also provide prompts on what a person might say. You might prompt them to mention their favorite feature of a product, their customer service experience, what they use the product for, or what results they’ve had. Within your copy, make sure to tell your customers how you will use their testimonials, and get their permission.

5. Create a Promotion Strategy

The next key component to a successful testimonial collection campaign is a promotion strategy. The ideal promotion strategy allows you to ask your customers for a testimonial at the perfect time and incentivize them to provide one. There are many different ways to do this. You might send an email asking for testimonials, ask your customer when you see them, or send an automated message to positive social messages. You might create a contest to encourage submissions, or give out prizes or discounts to each person who submits a testimonial.

6. Build a Testimonial Display Page

One of the most important components of a successful testimonial collection campaign is a place to display your testimonials once you receive them. There are many other places you can add testimonials to your website, in addition to a dedicated testimonials page. There are also many creative testimonials page designs you might use to get your customer’s attention.

7. Continuously Improve Your Strategy Based on Results

Your testimonial collection campaign is technically completed, but if you want to keep gathering more testimonials and get better results, you need a strategy to re-assess and improve. First, see how your campaign did; how many testimonials did you gather? Considering how many customers you approached, either in-person, via email, or social media, how many responded? Try changing your strategy next time, like asking more customers or narrowing your list to only your best customers, and compare the results. You might also offer a different incentive, or send multiple reminders.

With just a few easy additions to your website, Boast gives you many of the components you need to run a successful testimonial collection campaign. Once you set this process up, you can even let it run on its own through automation. Use your testimonials creatively and you can build more authority and customer confidence, and close more leads and sales.